Aspects of My Approach

My professional and personal experience is that deepening our embodied presence brings peace, slowness, stillness and equanimity. A sense of embodying our power, of being able to be with all things as they arise and pass away, of finding creative responses to life as it unfolds in and around us.

This is why supporting and developing the capacity for embodied presence is a crucial part of how I work.

It is important to me that I offer a relationship that is non-judgmental, respectful and safe with clear professional boundaries. I see both support and challenge as essential parts of a therapy relationship. Therapy is a commitment, which requires courage and honesty from both client and therapist.

Often people seek therapy when they have got stuck in repetitive patterns of feelings, thoughts, body sensations and actions. Therapy is a process that enables clients to increase their awareness of these patterns and thus make their own choices about changes they want to make in their lives. As well as increasing awareness of the client’s patterns, as a Gestalt therapist, I help create opportunities for clients to try out new ways of being in the world.

I celebrate difference and enjoy working with people from a wide range of different backgrounds. I welcome clients from diverse communities and of different ages, genders, sexual orientations. I welcome clients of differing abilities, and am happy to discuss any particular access requirements you may have. My consulting room in Shropshire has full wheelchair access.

I sometimes work with clients outdoors. I find that the aliveness of the natural world can be an incredible co-therapist. Examples of working outdoors are walking or sitting outside while talking, sitting quietly and feeling the earth or connecting intimately and deeply with aspects of the natural world such as trees, plants, animals and rivers.

This is how my accrediting body, The Gestalt Psychotherapy and Training Institute, describes Gestalt therapy:

“Gestalt psychotherapy is a practical and creative approach to therapy. It emphasizes that people cannot be understood in isolation, but only as part of the environment in which they live. It underlines the importance of the connection between psychological events and the settings in which the events occur. In the famous phrase: "no man is an island": we all influence and are influenced by our surroundings all the time.

The approach focuses on the development of people's holistic awareness of themselves, their circumstances and how they function in those circumstances. This involves assisting people to get a fuller sense of the ways they feel, think and act in different situations and at different times, through awareness of their moment-to-moment activity in the therapeutic setting. This in turn helps them to increase their choices about how they live their lives and interact with other people.”

I am fully committed to safe, confidential, ethical practice and subscribe to the GPTI Codes of Ethics

(See http://gpti.org.uk/gestalt-therapy/code-of-ethics/ for more details)